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Please Share Your Tips for Other Learners

In the fall of 2010, I attended my first Tamarack Communities Collaborating Institute. I read every piece of material on the suggested material and I thought I was ready to take everything in over the next 5 days. By day 2 I was exhausted, my hand was so sore from writing so much and my brain was reaching it's digestive capacity. The last time I remember feeling this way was when I was young and I read through several volumes of our Childrens' Encyclopedia Britannica.

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Social Innovation, Social Justice and Emotion: Connections to Community

In a recent webinar exploring six patterns of social innovation, Tamarack Thought-Leader Al Etmanski spoke of his hope for a “resurrection of the ordinary” which he described as “recognizing ordinary people and their extraordinary power.”

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Filling My Freezer and My Soul

When I returned to work after my second parental leave, one of the things I found a challenge to get organized was cooking dinner for my family. Having limited time to cook delicious and nutritious meals, my husband and I began to double up on recipes so that we could eat dinner and freeze the rest for a quick meal another night. It didn't take long before we began to feel bored with our meals, not even having enough time to research and try out new recipes.

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Putting Community in Collective Impact

Considerable attention is being paid to the role and importance of community engagement in successful collective impact efforts. The recent paper entitled Putting Community in Collective Impact by Richard Harwood and published by the Collective Impact Forum, dives more deeply into this important issue and concludes that, "civic culture matters for Collective Impact. Big Time!" Civic culture refers to the unique characteristics that describe "how a community works: how trust is formed, why and how people engage with each other; and the degree of readiness for change amongst leaders." Each community has its own civic culture and paying attention to it, makes it possible to accelerate and deepen collective impact efforts.

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What Makes Revelstoke a Vibrant Community?

We talk a lot about reducing poverty and poverty reduction strategies in the VC Learning Community. But what do we really envision our communities will look like when we've achieved our goals? And, what are the unique ways that our communities are already vibrant? There is a plethora of diversity throughout our groups and within them in answer to these questions.

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When Shortcuts Cut Us Short: Cognitive Traps in Philanthropic Decision-Making

How do we make good decisions when trying to tackle tough social challenges? This has been a central concern of management experts, policy analysts and community developers for nearly 100 years.

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